Why Healthcare Cannot Afford to Rely on Two-Factor Authentication

Healthcare is now the most vulnerable industry to data breaches, with 328 breaches in 2017 alone (accounting for 60% percent of all breaches last year). The total estimated cost of these breaches reached $1.2 billion.

Later in the year, PII (personally identifiable information) of 18,470 patients at Henry Ford Health System in Detroit were exposed due to theft of credentials of a group of employees. The PII was protected using a single factor of authentication (a password) and encrypted at rest.

Through just these few examples, we can see that, despite the complexity of security technologies and investments like data encryption, and network and endpoint security, the most common and effective attack vector is still stolen user credentials. According to the 2017 Verizon Data Breach Report, 81% of data breaches are due to compromised or weak credentials.

Many of the organizations that understand this turn to two-factor authentication (2FA) to strengthen defense against stolen credentials. While simple 2FA helps raise an organization’s security profile, many commonly deployed 2FA methods are insufficient to fully protect users and data and are easily circumvented.

On its own, 2FA will protect you some of the time but not all the time. Which is fine if you only want some of your organization protected. But it can be circumvented by attackers through:

Real-time phishing, which coerce a user into giving up their username, password, and one-time passcode by asking them to log into a phishing site or click a malicious link

SMS and voice call interception, where an attacker exploits the mobile carrier networks

Malware that uses malicious code to scrape SMS one-time passwords

Phone number porting fraud that uses social engineering methods to coerce a cellular company’s representative into issuing the attacker with a new SIM card or moving the victim’s phone number to a SIM card that the attacker already has

Out of band push-to-accept mechanisms, which essentially relies on bombarding an end-user to click ‘accept’ to make bothersome requests go away

Healthcare providers can strengthen authentication methods by adopting the following:

Implement adaptive authentication and risk analysis, such as analysis of the user’s geographic location, device recognition, analysis of a user’s IP address, and applying machine learning to look for anomalous behavior of the user’s credentials. This provides the highest identity security without impacting user experience. Users are only burdened with an additional authentication step if risks are present. This validates authentic users, like doctors and nurses, while blocking attackers with compromised credentials.

Phase out hard tokens to utilize self-service tools when possible while considering the total cost of ownership., Nurses, doctors and staff can access their data wherever they are through routine mechanisms by evolving to more modern authentication techniques that identify users through elements such as behavioral biometrics.

Prioritize the most flexible solution with the most future potential instead of relying on a quick fix. Choose integration-friendly solutions that maximize existing security investments from a vendor who can be a partner in both security and EPCS & HIPAA compliance. Only then will you achieve an accurate holistic view of all security threats and save considerable effort in compliance audits.

Provide the best possible user experience by building safeguards against human fallibility. By only requiring action when risk factors are high, teams balance security needs with user preferences. Utilize identity signifiers instead of passwords to empower physicians to access data and treat patients without having to call the help desk or initiate an online support ticket.

2FA is not strong enough to protect against even unsophisticated cyber-attacks. Clearly, busy healthcare workers need secure solutions that don’t inconvenience them as they tend to time-sensitive patient problems.

IT decision makers in the health services and patient care industry should strongly reassess their approach to authentication in order to keep their data and organization out of the cybercrime spotlight.